


Take Me Where I Cannot Stand

by oncethrown



Series: Oncethrown's AU Monday Stories [1]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hiatus fic, IN SPACE!, M/M, Space AU, shaumondays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 18:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10392954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncethrown/pseuds/oncethrown
Summary: This is not a good night for Lydia and Maia's ship to answer a distress call.The gravity calibration Simon promised to fix? Not fixed.The distress call they answer? Very distressed.The mysterious strangers they rescue? Very mysterious.And Lydia has to do all of this in her silliest pajamas.





	

**Author's Note:**

> AH! I've never written and AU.

Lydia woke up cold, with a weird crick in her neck. She groaned, rubbed her eyes and reached for the light switch beside her bed, only to find her hand moving through emptiness. She turned over, realized what was happening, and groaned in earnest. 

 

She was not by the light switch. Or the wall. Or her bed. She was floating about halfway between her mattress and her ceiling, with her blanket eddying above her as it was gently buffeted by the Atmo outputs. 

 

“Dammit.”

 

She lifted her legs, pressed her feet to the ceiling and kicked, sending herself flying back down toward her bed. She grabbed the headboard and flicked on the light before sending herself toward the door. 

 

Just as she approached, the door side comm lit up, surprising her sleepy brain just enough to make her miss her target. 

 

“Your ship’s grav calibration is fucked up again,” Maia’s voice crackled through the speaker as Lydia’s fingers slipped away from the door handle. 

 

As she floated resignedly away, Lydia replied. “Why is it only my ship when it’s broken? It was _our_ ship when we signed the deed. It was _your_ ship when that hunky Praetor guy was flirting with you, but the calibration goes wonky and suddenly it’s _my_ ship.”

 

“I know I bring this up a lot, but maybe if you weren’t covered in Institution Marks, you could flirt your way through the occasional Praetor check point. It’s not my fault you basically have “Shadowhunter Princess” branded on your forehead.”

 

Lydia sighed, hit her bedroom wall and kicked off of it toward the door. She hated when Maia had a point. 

 

“Are you going to go wake Simon up or do I have to? I’m assuming he’s not with you, or you wouldn’t have called me?”

 

“I’m clear on the other side of the ship, Lydia. You know I hate going through the main bay when the grav is fucked up.”

 

Lydia held in a cry of triumph as her fingers wrapped around the doorknob. “Maybe if you didn’t wear out _my_ mechanic the way you do his comm would wake him up.”

 

She could picture Maia rolling her eyes. “We’ve been in the black for two months. What else is there to do but wear out _my mechanic.”_

 

Maia turned the comm off from her side. Lydia rolled her eyes, and looked down at herself for a moment before determining that wearing the button up blue birdie pajamas she had bought the last time they were planet side did not make her less of a captain. 

 

Or, _technically_ , a princess.

 

There was an old fashioned cane velcroed next to her door. The grav calibration had been going out _a lot_ lately and she’d pulled it out of storage for exactly this reason. She unvelcroed it, and started to make her way down to Simon’s quarters, using the bottom of the cane to push herself off of walls and the top of it to hook around handles. It was a ridiculous way to travel through the ship. She should have forced Maia to wake up Simon. It wasn’t Lydia’s fault that the ship wasn’t working, or that her mechanic was a fucked out vampire who, no pun intended, slept like the dead.

 

A door in front of her began to open, just as she floated too close to it to easily turn. She it hit it gently, but with finality and spent a handful of very undignified seconds working her way around to the other side of it as the occupant of the room floated gracefully out into the hallway. 

 

“Grav acting up again?” Luke asked. Years of Pack training allowed him to float in one place, and his running shorts and gray tee-shirt let him look like an adult while doing it. Lydia regretted not changing her clothes before leaving her bunk.

 

“I’m on my way to get Simon,” Lydia sighed. “I thought you could sleep without gravity? Wasn’t it a luxury the Pack ships didn’t used to spring for?”

 

Luke shrugged. “Floated into my glass of water.  No longer in the glass.”

 

Before Lydia could tell Luke to just go back to bed, the hallway lit up and a high pitched, buzzing siren that even Simon couldn’t sleep through rang through the ship. 

 

“God fucking damnit,” Lydia growled. “Who the fuck is even out this far?”

 

“Better find out,” Luke replied. “Need a boost?”

 

“Ugh. Fine. Tell Simon to go directly to the hub and get the gravity working again.” 

 

Luke nodded, and grabbed a hold of the handle bar above his head as Lydia spun so that her back was toward him. His feet hit her squarely in the ass and she rocketed down the hallway as he called “Sorry about that, Captain,” behind her. 

 

If Simon didn’t get the fucking grav fixed for good this time, she was going to throw him out of the airlock. 

 

**

 

Maia was already on the bridge when Lydia floated through the door. She was even strapped to her seat in front of the view screen, already creating a flight path. Her pajamas were also relatively dignified. Light purple short shorts and a darker purple tank top. Her hair was tied up in a silk scarf. 

 

“It’s a distress call,” Maia announced, turning back to face Lydia. Her eyes widened for a moment before her mouth quirked up. “What in the hell are you wearing?”

 

“My bunk gets cold,” Lydia replied grouchily holding her cane out to Maia. Maia used it to pull Lydia to the view screen and Lydia strapped herself into the stool next to her co-captain.

 

“Ooookay,” Maia replied, reaching out and pinching the light flannel fabric with little cartoon birds printed on it between her fingers.  “This… is a different sort of distress call. We’re coming back to this.”

 

“Do we have a visual on the ship yet?” Luke asked, floating through the door. “Who are we dealing with?”

 

“I’m trying to get us close enough for the sensors to see the ship without immediately letting them comm us. We’re _way_ out in the black, but the closest inhabited space to this is Shadowhunter space.”

 

“Can’t be too careful,” Luke said with a nod. He tapped his feet against the ground and flew toward the ceiling with his arms up over head. He managed to press himself off the ceiling and directly into his pilot’s chair. He stuck one arm under the seat and used it to ground himself as he strapped himself into his chair. All fluid, all practiced, all aggravating.

 

Maia quirked an eyebrow at him. “Show off.”

 

Luke grinned unrepentently. “What direction are we going?”

 

“Bump me a little starboard,” Maia replied. “They’re probably fifteen miles away, I should be able to get a snap of them at ten miles.”

 

Lydia grabbed a recording of the distress sound off the security feed and started to run it against the data base, trying to get a match on the make and model of the ship. The last thing she wanted was a tanker full of shadowhunters comming them, so she could explain a bridge full of werewolves in their pajamas. 

 

“Plants need gravity,” a voice at the door announced, annoyance permeating every syllable. 

 

Lydia didn’t look back right away. “Technically, Meliorn, they don’t.”

 

“My plants, which provide the food you eat, the air you breathe, clean the water you drink, and propel us through this bleak, dead nothingness, need gravity.”

 

Lydia sighed and looked back at her horticulturalist. They were lucky as hell to have a Seelie on board. And she knew that. And when it wasn’t about his plants, Meliorn could even be personable. That was lucky too. 

 

But there were other things going on right now. 

 

Also Meliorn’s pajamas, a soft, silvery blue tunic that he’d probably woven from one of the plants in his cavernous work room, with loose fitting pants in the same color, were floating around him in a charmingly ethereal way, which only made Lydia feel more ridiculous. 

 

“Meliorn, Simon is working on the gravity right now and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on with this distress call. Maybe they’ll have some extra parts that can help out. Until then, the plants can float a little bit.”

 

Meliorn pursed his lips at her, but his eyes shifted to the view screen. “What sort of distress call?”

 

“This kind,” Lydia replied, punching a button to replay the sound. 

 

Meliorn’s eyes narrowed. He pushed himself fully into the room. “Play it again.”

 

Lydia did.  Meliorn’s face stayed intense. He floated to the interface, and pressed the button himself. 

 

“Magic,” he whispered. 

 

The bridge went silent. 

 

There was no magic in space. 

 

“Uh… visual confirmed,” Maia said. 

 

“Luke, slow us down,” Lydia ordered. 

 

Maia brought the snap of the ship up on the view screen. 

 

“What… the hell,” Luke said, speaking for all of them. 

 

When Meliorn had declared he sensed magic, a small, childish part of Lydia had been expecting to see some old warlock ship of legend. A gleaming, colorful, ridiculous confection of a ship, held together more with magic than rivets. In the stories, they were, generously, pleasure cruises. Groups of warlocks bored with their endless planetside lives zipping off through the black in search of adventure. If the writer of the story was not inclined to be generous (or had grown up on a core planet in a shadowhunter controlled galaxy) warlock ships were little more than floating orgies, careening into suns or asteroid fields because the inhabitants were too focused on their debauchery to notice their doom. Very few people knew what had happened to the warlocks. It was knowledge that, as Lydia’s parents would have said… ran in families. 

 

A lot of Shadowhunter secrets ran in families. 

 

The ship on the screen was barely a ship. It was a little planet hopper, the kind of thing servants were sent out in to run errands off world. Just enough wormhole capacity to make it a few hundred light years between refueling. 

 

And the insignia on the side was unmistakeable. A huge, black Angelic Power rune.

 

 “Shiiitttt. Are we headed toward a fleet? I checked and double checked, there are no fleet routes through this part of the galaxy, that’s why we’re out here.” Maia huffed. “How the fuck does a ship that size get all the way out here?”

 

“Magic,” Meliorn repeated. 

 

“On a Shadowhunter ship?” Luke asked. “That’s not just impossible, it’s insane.”

 

“Bring us close enough to scan them,” Lydia ordered, her gut starting to churn. She may have  had no talent for working without gravity, or picking out pajamas, but she could sure as hell feel trouble when it was coming her way. “Come up from behind, the guns on those things can’t turn.”

 

Luke brought their ship closer to the abandoned one. Meliorn, his interest grabbed by something other than his plants for once, settled himself in a stool on the far side of the bridge and strapped himself in. 

 

“Two life forms showing on the scans,” Maia reported. “Not enough fuel to get anywhere… and they are running out of air.”

 

“Shit,” said Luke. 

 

“They’re comming us,” Maia said. 

 

“I’ll take it,” Lydia replied, already pressing accept. 

 

A face appeared on the screen. It was so shadowed and haggard— obvious signs of hypoxemia— that it took Lydia a moment to notice the other obvious sign on it. 

 

Cat eyes. 

 

They were comming a warlock. 

 

An _actual_ warlock. 

 

“My name is…” He started weakly, the words rattling in his mouth. “Magnus… Bane.” 

 

“Jesus,” Maia leaned back to see the face on the comm. “Luke, bring us closer, get ready to dock.” 

 

“Okay, Magnus Bane,” Lydia told him, trying to sound calm and in control and not like she was freaking out at coming face to face with a warlock where a warlock couldn’t possibly be. "We’re coming into docking range, we want to help you, but let’s do this by the book. Did you get your vessel bio scrubbed before you last left planet side?”

 

“No,” he gasped. 

 

“Okay, we then we need to scan and scrub before we let you on our ship. We’ll get air in the lock though, don’t worry.”

 

“Docking in 10,” Luke announced, his eyes trained on the screen in front of him. 

 

Lydia kept going through the checklist as Luke counted down. “Did you steal that ship?” 

 

“No.” 

 

“Eight,” Luke said.

 

“I’m filling our lock with over oxygenated air,” Maia announced. “On that small a ship it should be enough to perk them up. Get them moving into our airlock.”

 

Lydia nodded, still watching Magnus. “Who’s the other person on board?”

 

“Four,” Luke intoned.

 

“No,” the warlock gasped again. 

 

“Hypoxemia,” Meliorn commented. 

 

“Three.”

 

The warlock on the screen collapsed. 

 

“We’re coming!” Maia shouted. 

 

“Shit! Magnus! Magnus?” A second voice was gasping over the comm now. A hand shot up into view of the screen and a face lurched up after it. The blue tinge to the pale skin was unmistakeable. They were dying. 

 

“Two.”

 

The second man threw his arms over Magnus. 

 

His lanky, _rune-covered_ arms. 

 

“Initiating dock,” Luke announced. 

 

They all held their breath. 

 

“Dock secure.”

 

Maia punched the air lock release. Lydia could hear the _whoosh_ of air going through the warlock’s ship, even over the comm. 

 

** 

 

It had been just enough oxygen, just in time. The thought floated through Alec’s half suffocated brain like a pink cloud as he lay back in his chair, gasping the air— diluted, yes, but rich with oxygen that hadn’t been magicked over and over until it was useless— until he felt a live again. 

 

He set his hand to Magnus’s back, relief washing through him as he felt Magnus’s lungs rising and falling, dragging in air and letting it back out. 

 

They were alive. 

 

They were alive, despite everything. 

 

He took another gasp and dropped his head forward, looking at the strange band surrounding the comm screen. 

 

Two young women in their pajamas. Behind them, a man about their age, with long hair and a tattoo on his face and another man, clean cut and clearly a few years older. 

 

“Give yourself a few more moments to breathe,” the younger man instructed. “Then try to stand, and move toward the air lock.”

 

Alec nodded, still gasping. 

 

The story he’d been working on as he and Magnus sat here together, debating whether or not they should risk boosting their distress signal had completely fled his mind. Not that it mattered. They’d seen Magnus’s eyes. They’d seen his runes. He sucked in another breath of air. 

 

At least it wasn’t a Shadowhunter ship. Maybe… maybe if they were mundanes, he and Magnus still stood a chance. 

 

“Just breathe,” the blonde woman said. “We are going to do a disease and bio scan of your ship, and then once you can move into the air lock, we’ll scan the two of you.”

 

Alec nodded, acutely aware of the huge rune on his neck as he did so. He wondered how far from home they had actually made it. What quadrant were they in? Magic and space were a tricky combination. They’d taken a huge risk. 

 

By the Angel, let it pay off, Alec thought. 

 

“Okay,” the black girl said, “Your ship scans clean, that’s great. Think you can start moving toward the door for us?”

 

Alec nodded. Magnus sat up. 

 

On the screen, the blonde girl turned toward the older of the two men and said something that Alec completely missed when he saw her neck. 

 

Shit. _Shit._

 

Runes. There were runes on her neck, above the collar of her shirt. 

 

Too late now. There was certain death, here in a dead ship, or there was… delayed death of some kind aboard a ship full of people who had pumped oxygen in for a warlock. 

 

“What’s your name?” The blond woman, the Shadowhunter, asked. “ Whenever you’re ready.”

 

“Alec,” he managed. 

 

There was a pause. They were waiting for a last name. Of course they were. They’d seen the runes. And she’d know. If he gave her a fake last name, she’d know. 

 

“Alec Verlac,” he lied. There was no way a Verlac could be blond, and he was mostly sure no one in the extended Verlac family was black. And they were a small family that owned a planet they saw little reason to leave. It was the best he could do in the circumstances. 

 

No one on the other side of the screen questioned it. With another gulp of air, Alec stood and helped Magnus to his feet, turning off the comm screen as he did. 

 

“They’re Shadowhunters,” Alec hissed to him as they moved toward the air lock. 

 

“Not all of them,” Magnus replied. 

 

A shiver of worry went through Alec. Magnus had been low on oxygen and holding the ship together with magic. Now he was talking nonsense. What did it take to leave lasting damage on a warlock?

 

“Magnus,” Alec started. 

 

“I know,” Magnus replied, squeezing his hand. “Trust me.”

 

Alec opened his mouth to protest, but squeezed back. “I do.”

 

***

 

“Holy crap!” Simon yelled. “You get banished to the the Hub and you miss frickin everything.”

 

“I did not banish you to the Hub,” Lydia protested. “I sent you to the Hub, to fix the gravity that you keep failing to fix.” 

 

“This little baby will solve all your grav problems.” Simon tossed the little mechanism between his hands into the air, looked up after it sheepishly when it just kept going, then jumped up after it. 

 

It was a replacement part they had stripped from Magnus and Alec’s ship. Simon had achieved what Meliorn classified as “better than nothing gravity,” just before Lydia had cleared Alec and Magnus to come aboard, and since their ship wasn’t going anywhere, the crew had descended on it. 

 

Lydia had asked Meliorn to take the two shipwrecked men up to what was known amongst the crew as the Crow’s Nest, a reinforced plastic bubble near the kitchen. It was sort of a living room. The ship’s book shelves were housed there, and it was full of plants and cushions. Lydia liked to sit it in with a cup of tea, watching the vastness of space sail by. 

 

It was a good place to relax after you’d nearly died, while a crew of strangers picked over the ship that had nearly been your coffin like space piranhas. 

 

“Decent haul,” Maia commented, wheeling in a dolly full of stuff. “Rations, better maps for this part of space than I have. A few books. And… a bunch of stuff that I think might be spell ingredients.”

 

Luke crossed his arms over his chest. “And two… very mysterious… what? Fugitives? Refugees?”

 

Lydia sighed and cricked her neck, like she always did when she was stressed. It had been a very long night, and she’d had to do all of it in her silliest pajamas. 

 

There were things about her life… before this ship that only Maia knew. There were things no one knew. And there were things that Lydia was pretty sure her crew had… assumed. Pieced together. There were things that werewolves, vampires, and Seelies hated Shadowhunters for. Shadowhunters, plural. Shadowhunters as a great, be-runed, conquering swarm. 

 

Lydia hadn’t personally done most of those things. Ever since she’d left her homeworld behind she’d tried so hard to be better. To leave that life, and those ideas behind her. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t still a Shadowhunter. She knew what Shadowhunters were capable of. And there were only a few reasons a Shadowhunter and a warlock would risk death to run away. 

 

And she didn’t want any of those reasons on their ship. 

 

She cleared her throat. “I’m going to go talk to Alec about that. The rest of you… finish stripping the planet hopper. Maia, would you mind mapping a couple options for a world to drop them off on?”

 

“In Shadowhunter space or the Band?”

 

Lydia raised her eyebrows. 

 

“Right. The Band it is. Good old… no questions asked, different species pretending to live in harmony space.” Maia rubbed her eyes. “It’s been a long night.”

 

“Tell me about it,” Lydia sighed. “And Simon?” She called up after the vampire, who was still attempting to catch the piece he’d tossed. 

 

“Yeah, Captain?”

 

“Fix the fucking gravity.”

 

**

 

Lydia made her way up the Crow’s Nest, still floating. She’d forgotten her cane on the bridge in all the commotion. 

 

Where was she even going to start? Should she accuse Alec of lying about being a Verlac? If he was a Verlac, than she was a purple Rhinocerous. 

 

No… let him pretend to be a Verlac. She’d been lying about her own last name for so long it was much too hypocritical to call out a stranger on his own lie. 

 

She could bring up the very likely scenario that Alec had stolen Magnus from some rich Shadowhunter family that had been living off his magic, possibly for generations. But she couldn’t face talking about Magnus like an object to be stolen.

 

She caught herself against the sides of the hallway that lead up into the Crow’s Nest and took a breath. 

 

Her crew had just saved their lives. They were going to be living on this ship for at least a week while the crew found somewhere safe to drop them off. She would just… awkwardly float into the Crow’s Nest, attempt to look dignified in her cartoon printed pajamas, and either Alec and Magnus would tell her the truth out of gratitude, or fear… or she would make her peace with never knowing, and she’d be rid of them in a week. 

 

Yes. 

 

She pushed herself forward, floating head first into the Crows Nest, but not quite far enough. She was just far enough inside the large, circular room that she could see Magnus and Alec, but not so far in that they would have noticed her. And too far away from any surface to do anything than awkwardly float here until they noticed her. 

 

But… with no footsteps to announce her, it was pretty unlikely they would have noticed her anyway. 

 

They were holding each other. Clinging to each other. Alec’s face was pressed into the crook of Magnus’s neck. Magnus’s arms were wrapped around Alec’s shoulders, his thumb running over the top knock of Alec’s spine. 

 

Lydia was too shocked to interrupt them. This couldn’t possibly be what it looked like. 

 

They moved, pressing their foreheads together, and whispering together before tilting their chins forward, into a kiss. 

 

Lydia’s stomach lurched in what she assumed was shock, until the feeling kept going. The gravity suddenly kicked in, and Lydia crumpled, loudly, to the floor. 

 

Alec and Magnus jumped. First upward, then away from each other. 

 

Lydia pulled herself to her feet, ignoring her bruised pride, knees, and elbows. 

 

“I’ll come back later,” she managed, trying to sound nonchalant and not in anyway, blown away by this particular revelation. “There is tea in top cupboard if you’d like some,” she rambled. “The… kettle probably floated away. Um… make yourselves at home. You can sleep here. There are blankets… sort of all over here. We’ll… I’ll just come back in the morning.

 

She turned around and walked away, heading directly for Maia’s quarters, trying to figure out how to explain just how many Shadowhunter laws their new ship mates were breaking, and how much ugly Shadowhunter history she could justify hiding from her best friend. 

 

 


End file.
